It is 1958, at the peak of the Cold War. MI6 sends thirty-year-old Lois Vale to Moscow on a covert operation. It had been seven years since the high-profile defections of Burgess and Maclean at MI6, yet British intel kept leaking to the enemy. MI6 was once again compromised. In the guise of a secretary at the British Embassy, Vale’s mission is to smoke out the mole feeding the Soviets intel. However, she has just arrived in Moscow when a stranger, who seems disturbingly well-informed about her identity, approaches and gives her a warning about Moscow. Is her cover blown? But there is no option to back out. As she takes on her role in Moscow, a city fraught with tension and under observation, Vale has to use her wits, memory, and intuition to survive the danger around her and accomplish her mission. Discover more in Deborah Lawrenson’s The Secretary.

Lawrenson unfolds the intriguing plot through a third-person perspective voice and sharp, layered conversations. Accompanied by introspection, these gave me insight into the characters’ emotions, traits, and conflicts, allowing me to connect with them. The evocative depictions uniquely captured the mood and setting. These brought Moscow and Eastern Europe to life on the pages. I was drawn into the murky realm of espionage, where grave danger was one step away from misplaced loyalty, trust, and love, and shrewdness, ruthlessness, secrecy, and ambition are the currencies for survival. The subtle tone of the storyline had me flipping through page after page. Deborah Lawrenson’s The Secretary will be an enthralling read for lovers of slow-burn espionage and historical event/era novels blended with drama, romance, and adventure.

The Secretary by Deborah Lawrenson is set in 1958 and begins with Lois Vale travelling by train to Moscow. She has been recruited by the Foreign Office in London to hunt down a possible spy in the British Embassy in the Russian capital. Despite her training before the mission, she is aware that should she be exposed, there is no backup and she is on her own. There are vivid descriptions of the frenetic lifestyle of civil servants living abroad, long hours of work during the day, and wild parties at night. As Lois is drawn further into the darker side, she falls in love, but can she even trust the man she has grown to adore? She battles with a flatmate on the verge of a breakdown, and the many young men who vie for her favors. As the tension builds, the sense of fear is never absent, interspersed with fascinating glimpses into Moscow and its treasures.

A roller coaster ride is the best way to describe The Secretary by Deborah Lawrenson. Her descriptions of Moscow, the city, the music, the ballet, Cossack dancing, the architecture, and even the frozen Moskva River all spring to life on the pages. But most of all, it is the sense of fear, constant threat, the stalking by the KGB, and never knowing who you can trust. Added to Lois’s directive as a spy, despite her nerves of steel and a photographic memory, she is inadvertently caught up in disobeying the rules. I appreciated the easy-to-refer-to list of characters at the beginning of the book, as there was quite a large number of staff, plus a few outsiders. A strong thread in the narrative is the low expectations of women in the hierarchy; for example, they have to resign if they marry. I loved this book and cannot recommend it highly enough. Despite it being set in 1958, I doubt much has changed in those corridors of diplomacy.